Blood Is the Sky (2003)
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Read by Jim Bond

When a fire is done, what’s left is only half-destroyed. It is charred & brittle. It is obscene. There is nothing so ugly in all the world as what a fire leaves behind, covered in ashes & smoke & a smell you’ll think about every day for the rest of your life.

Reluctant investigator Alex McKnight finds himself drawn by friendship into a long drive north. The brother of Alex’s longtime Ojibwa friend Vinnie LeBlanc works as a hunting guide, serving the rich clients from downstate. It seems that Vinnie’s brother & his most recent group of hunters have vanished in northern Ontario, & Vinnie is scared enough to ask Alex to help him find them.

Their arrival sets in motion a heart-pounding string of events that leaves Alex & his friend miles from civilization, stranded in the heart of the Canadian wilderness with no food, no weapons -& no way out. And there’s someone out there who definitely does not want them to make it back alive.

At once elegant & enormously suspenseful, Steve Hamilton’s Blood Is the Sky heralds his arrival as one of the premier crime writers working today.